Best way to update website?
 

I recently installed Mandrake 9.2. I have the apache webserver running under the var/www/html directory. The problem is that my user "bob" can only use the /home/bob directory. I would like to make bob's home directory to /www/html and also give him permissions to use this directory. How could I do this and what would I want to set the permissions of the /www/html/ directory to?
ex. drwxrwxr-x?

You give "bob" read/write permissions he should be able to make changes to the /var/www/html directory.

if you run (as root) " chmod 777 /var/www/html " that should give bob the permissions he needs to make changes to your apache web files.

Hope this helps. Write back and let us know how you made out.

Yes it worked great! Thanks. The only other thing is I update my webpages through dreamweaver and ftp them to the server. The ftp client requires that the home directory for "bob" be /var/www/html. Currently when I ftp to the linux box it starts at /home/bob. Is there a command line argument for this also?

You can change bobs home dir to /var/www/html Do this in Control Panel or User Manager. I haven't used Mandrake in a few years so not sure exactly what it is called or located in menus.

You do realize that chmod 777 on that dir not only gave bob rights, it gave EVERYONE rights to that dir, right? :tisk:

You may want to also look at SSH, it offers SCP and you can copy to any dir you have rights to... See OpenSSH for details.

Yeah i was wondering that. Because in the argument chmod 777 /var/www/html there is no reference to bob at all. Should I have done something like chmod 777 "bob only" /var/www/html? Is this going to cause any security issues? Is this argument easily reversed?

Changing the perms to 777 on the html directory opens makes the directory writable by anyone (even nobody user). You may want to audit any of your dynamically generated content for possible security holes. Be careful if you ever delete Bob's account. You might accidentally delete his home directory and thus all of your content. You might want to leave Bob's home directory where it was and a) put him in a group that has write access to the content or b) make him the owner of the content.